Portrait of Peter I. Engraving, Peter Schenk. End of 17th cent.

Peter I, being in his twelfth year, was given a free hand. He made friends with aliens. Genevan Lefort (23(?) years his senior) had taught him the Dutch language. He clothed the company of poteshny boy-soldiers à la German style. Peter was a drum major in it and was promoted to sergeant for merit. Thus began an important turnabout that he accomplished subsequently: suppression of the nobility and inauguration of ranks.

Boyars looked on Peter's escapades with displeasure and anticipated innovations. Instigated by them, the czarina and the patriarch expostulated with the young czar to leave off the exercises as not behooving his dignity... The boyars wanted to instill love in him for other amusements and invited him to a hunting. Peter-- whether of his own accord or on the advice of his favorites--took it into his head to make fun of them; he made as if he agreed; he fixed the time of the hunting, but upon his arrival said it in so many words he would not amuse himself with bondsmen but would rather have gentlemen alone participating in the czar's entertainment. The huntsmen rode off, consigning the dogs to the masters' care but these were unable to cope. There was utter confusion. The dogs startled horses; the horses bolted, the dogs tugged at the laces put on the hands of the green huntsmen. Peter was glad beyond measure--and the next day, as the gentlemen had refused his invitation to a falconry, he told them: "Learn that it behooves a czar to be a fighting man, while hunting is a mean occupation for serfs only..."

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... Peter had picked out 35 sons of the boyars and gentry and sent them to alien parts to learn engineering, the art of shipbuilding and navigation, architecture and other sciences. He supplied them with letters of recommendation and solicitations addressed to the ceasar, kings, the General States of Holland, kurfuersten, princes, counts and other top men and subjects and seafaring men concerning their free passage, protection and succor. On his side Peter pledged protection of every kind to their subjects arriving in his state...

... Dispatching young gentlemen abroad, Peter, apart from the state benefit, was pursuing yet another objective. He wanted their fathers to keep the pledge of loyalty during his absence. For the sovereign intended to leave Russia for a long time that he might learn in alien parts whatever his state still lacked, plunged as it was in the bathos of crass ignorance...

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... Peter stopped over in Berlin and busied himself with artillery and got a testimonial there. His embassy was received everywhere with honor.

Peter often got out of his carriage, paying attention to land cultivation, making drawings of tools unknown to him, enquiring all the way and taking notes.

Upon his arrival [in the Low Countries] he and his retinue donned the seaman's getups and set off to Saardam in a jolly boat; on his way thither he saw a fisherman in a boat, once a shipwright at Voronezh; Peter called him by name and said he intended to stay over at his home... Peter practiced the art of shipbuilding from morn to night. He purchased an ice-boat and wrought a mast on it (that was his invention), sailing from Amsterdam to Saardam and back, standing at the helm all by himself, while in the meantime the gentlemen were employed as sailors. Now and then he went out to buy victuals for dinner, and in the absence of a mistress he cooked by himself... The shipwrights called him Piter Baas, and this appellation, putting him in mind of his fitful, jolly and odd youth, he kept for the rest of his life.

Thereupon Peter went to Amsterdam, where he inspected the Kunstkammer, mathematical instruments and Minz-cabinets (mint gardens), animal and poultry houses (menagéries), churches... At the paper works, having examined a solution, he scooped out a paper sheet with his own hands, which all masters found won-drously thin and clean. His Majesty was learning anatomy, surgery, engineering, geography, physics, etc.

Peter's ship was ready. The czar, naming her "Peter and Paul", had her sent to Archangel. That ship was the first in Russia to appear in the White Sea...

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... Early that year Peter set out for England on a yacht and three men-of-war sent by the [English] king, with part of his embassy.

... Meanwhile he applied himself indefatigably to marine architecture. He passed his time there as he had done it in Holland. Once the king... ordered an exemplary kriegspiel at sea. Admiring the exercises, said he [Peter]: "Had I not been a Russian czar, I would have wished to be an English admiral..."

... Peter got down to domestic reforms. By his own example (and ukases?) he diminished the number of serfs. He would turn up out-of-doors with one or three batmen galloping after him. Boyars were compelled to dismiss their manor serfs. These sponges, who had waxed fat, dispersed then, and fell into indigence and debauchery. Peter, promising to leave them with impunity, called them up into service. A great multitude of them gathered.

As many as 32,032 were recruited. Peter brought them into 29 regiments of infantry and horse cavalry... Officers were taken from the Russian gentry and consigned to foreigners for instruction. The troops were clad after the German model. The foot soldiers had green full-dress coats with red cuffs, camisoles and trousers. The horsemen wore blue coats, with red cuffs, etc.

Looking into the register of boyars and noblemen and seeing many idle out of service, Peter ordered all of them

to be assigned to infantry regiments and to the navy, sending them to Voronezh and Azov for instruction in the marine service. Peter had it promulgated that no one should place hopes on his birthright but move up in rank by diligence and dignity.

By the conquest of Azov Peter opened the way to the Black Sea as well, but he would not stop at that as sufficient for Russia in bringing is people closer to the enlightened states of Europe. Turkey stood in between. He turned impatiently his looks northwest and towards the Baltic Sea which was in the possession of Sweden. He thought of the Izhora and Karelian lands lying about the Gulf of Finland erstwhile belonging to us but seized from us illegally during our ill-starred wars and interregnum... The silence of the Swedish court in reply to our demand for satisfaction provided a new cause in this regard...

... His ukases Peter would sign with his own hand.

He ordered to have the system of chronology starting from the birth of Christ, not from the creation of the world, and to have the first of the year from the 1st of January of 1700, not from the 1st of September. To grace this good initiative he ordered to have all houses in Moscow adorned with green twigs (fir) and greet one another on the new year and new century (centennial).

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... Still in the heat of war Peter thought about founding a haven to set off trade with northwestern Europe and establish closer communications with learning. Charles XII [King of Sweden] was in the heyday of his glory; it seemed impossible, in the opinion of all Europe, to keep the newly conquered places in hand. But Peter the Great persevered in his great intention to break ground on an island lying near the sea, which he did on the Neva, on May 16th, for the fortress of St. Petersburg... A wooden church consecrated to Peter and Paul was built within the fortress and quite nearby, in place of a fisher's cabin, a palace likewise of wood was put up, seven sazhens long and three sazhens wide [sazhen, an old Russian measure of length, equivalent to 2.13 meters], with two chambers, a porch and kitchen, with whitewashed sackcloth walls, simple furniture and a bedstead. Peter's cabin is still there in its original look.

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... By the river Yauza Peter ordained to build to his own plan Russia's first military spital [hospital] (the same year the spital was finished). He wrote for foreign apothecaries and let an anatomical school established at the spital, filling the dissecting-room with sundry human monsters and the like, and laid out a botanical garden in which he worked now and then.

A History of Peter I, an unfinished work of Pushkin's, has come down to us in the form of an extensive preparatory text in which Pushkin worded the results of his studies into the Petrine epoch. Proceeding from this text (or the Materials for a History of Peter the Great), covering events of the Petrine time in chronological order, Pushkin aimed--as he confided shortly before his death--to write down his History of Peter "within a year or a half year" and afterwards "amend it by documents".

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Pushkin conceived his History of Peter still back in the latter half of the 1820s. "I shall write a history of Peter I without fail," he averred in September of 1827.

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... As of the beginning of 1832 Pushkin, without confining himself to studies of printed historical evidence, started giving a good deal of time to his work in the archives. Karl Nesselrode, the foreign minister, who was also in charge of the State

Archives.., enquired "whether the czar would be willing" to let "all secret papers of the times of Emperor Peter I" be opened to Pushkin, "namely: about his first consort, about czarevich Alexei Petrovich; also what concerns the affairs of the former Secret Chancellery"... The czar commanded that such historical documents should be handed to Pushkin "by permission"...

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Telling in the fall of 1833... about the difficulties involved in the work on A History of Peter, Pushkin mused, "I need not hurry: I should make myself familiar with the subject-matter and keep working on it continually"... In May of 1834 Pushkin wrote to his wife, Natalia Nikolayevna: "You ask me about Peter? It proceeds little by little: I collect materials, put them in order--perchance I shall produce a bronze horseman"... But afterwards... Pushkin chose first to put down a preparatory text encompassing events of the Petrine time, year by year, from Peter's birth down to his death...

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... Completing the preparatory text of A History of Peter on the 15th December of 1835, Pushkin kept working on it... He continued perusing materials of the Petrine era up to his last days: in January of 1836 Alexander Turgenev familiarized Pushkin with copies of dispatches of French ambassadors to Russia under Peter and his successors sent to Paris (Turgenev brought these copies from France). Pushkin read that up just on the eve of his fatal duel late in January 1837.

The work on A History of Peter in those years, according to the poet's contemporaries, was his major oeuvre. "These last years... Peter the Great captured all his attention," recalled Mikhail Pogodin, a historian close to Pushkin and well familiar with this work. "With much diligence he read over alt documents bearing on the life of our great reformer and all writings about him." Alexander Turgenev, another celebrity versed in historical documents of the time, echoed: "I found in it a wellspring of talent, observations and scholarship on Russia, about Peter and Catherine in particular--out of the way, singular." And he enlarged, "No one judged as well about Russian recent history..."

Ilya FEIN BERG, a Pushkin scholar, from his article A History of Peter I